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Comment by suction | Hacker News Reader

Let's not beat around the bush: In Japan, "UX" as a discipline is almost non-existent. In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal. No Japanese consumer would dare to question or criticise a famous Japanese corporation for their website design or practices. It's only OK for foreign companies like Amazon. It's all top-down, basically. The gerontocratic leadership of these corporations barely think of internet sales as a necessity, they just budgetize it minimally against their will. There are a few exceptions like Uniqlo, Muji, etc. but those are only possible because they also want to do business outside of Japan and therefore are forced to adopt "unjapanese" concepts. Meanwhile the most important device in Japanese households still is not a laptop, but a fax machine.

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> In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal.

That's a weird way to put that. American newsletters have an unsubscribe link because our Congress passed a law in 2003. But Americans lets prescription drugs advertise on television, which is an indefensible barbarism. So it goes. Every country has a different vision of what nuisances are and are not worth of regulation.

Yea, that seems to go back to what the article describes:

>Urban Landscape – Walk around one of Tokyo’s main hubs like Shibuya and you’re constantly bombarded with bright neon advertisements, noisy pachinko parlours (game arcades), and crowds of rambunctious salary men or school kids

The only American analogues to such a design would be some parts of New York City and Las Vegas. Not even Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Chicago as mega metropolitan areas have this kind of "density". Japan has a third of the population crammed into less than 5% of the land area. So adverts have a lot more incentive to just cram everything into a city block compared to any american city

There are kernels of truth in here, like the unsubscribe link not required by law.

But there are many huge Japanese internet based companies, like Zozotown, that are extremely savvy at their UX experience and are extremely metrics driven. Not to mention the recent surge of internet based cellular providers that don’t have a brick and mortar storefront.

Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.

> Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.

My wife's small business included a fax, but it didn't get much use after around 2014-2015 or so, I think. The next couple of years you could occasionally hear a call to the fax machine but it was always just some random ad spam. We let it all go to /dev/null. Nowadays her work space is rented out to a small service firm and they don't use a fax at all as far as I know. Internet and phone services were super important to get set up though.

Rakuten's web design is often blamed by who prefer beauty, but they continue using the design because they found it is best for selling more.

Yes, I know because Japanese people love blinking visual trash.

Even in the TV shows in Japan, it's a whole trashy mess of colours and patterns and huge subtitles flying around the screen.

Funny you say that, but Uniqlo a Japanese owned fashion brand and quite popular in Australia has a fantastic modern e-commerce website.

So you actually didn't read the comment.

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